A West Los Angeles man and the Russian national who he married last year were arrested today by federal immigration officials after being charged with marriage fraud for allegedly entering into a sham marriage so the woman could obtain documents that would allow her to remain in the United States.

A Lebanese woman who became an agent for the FBI and CIA after faking her US citizenship used her position to gain access to secret files on the terrorist group Hezbollah - the latest security breach to hit America's top intelligence agencies.

Nada Nadim Prouty, 37, was hired by the FBI and CIA after vetting procedures by America's most security-sensitive agencies failed to uncover that she had obtained US citizenship illegally through a sham marriage.

A federal judge decided Friday that an Ormond Beach woman accused of arranging illegal marriages to help immigrants fraudulently get green cards should stay locked up until her trial.

One reason Natalia Humm will remain behind bars, according to testimony, was apparently her track record with federal investigators.

Federal authorities say they have uncovered another marriage fraud ring tied to the Navy.

One current and one former sailor have been indicted with two Eastern European women on charges that they arranged their marriages for mutual benefits: The sailors received larger housing allowances and the women received green cards.

A fifth suspect, Ricardo Estaban Fernandez, a sailor in his 30s stationed in Norfolk, is suspected of leading the marriage fraud ring. He is scheduled to appear in federal court today for a bond hearing.

A Registry of Motor Vehicles clerk charged with issuing fraudulent identity cards had been ordered deported for repeatedly lying to government and immigration officials, court records show.

Dolores Rodriguez LaFlamme was arrested this month and charged with multiple counts of conspiracy to commit identity fraud. Investigators allege that in return for payments, LaFlamme and another woman gave identity documents to people looking to conceal criminal histories, dodge arrest warrants or hide their immigration status.

Robert Berishaj and Lula Dedivanaj are engaged to be married, but there's a catch that's preventing them from marital bliss.

Berishaj is now on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, deported last week by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to Montenegro even though he's lived in the U.S. since he was 9. Berishaj is of Albanian descent and was born in Montenegro.

"He is my world. He means everything to me," Dedivanaj said Monday, wiping away tears. They met three months ago and she said they were set to be married Jan. 19 in St. Paul Catholic Church in Rochester, where many of Albanian heritage attend. Dedivanaj of Fenton was born in the U.S., but her ethnicity is also Albanian.

An assistant U.S. attorney from Florida was arrested in an Internet sting operation after flying to Michigan to have sex with a 5-year-old girl, authorities said Monday.

John D.R. Atchison, 53, was arrested Sunday at Detroit Metropolitan Airport after several weeks of Internet conversations between the prosecutor and a detective posing as the mother of a 5-year-old girl, authorities say.

A former immigration official and his sister pleaded guilty yesterday to fraud and conspiracy charges in a million-dollar scheme to arrange sham marriages in order to obtain illegal green cards.

The former official, Phillip Browne, 41, worked until December 2005 as a district adjudication officer for the federal Citizenship and Immigration Services in Manhattan. His sister, Beverly Mozer-Browne, 50, once owned a financial and legal service business in Queens called Help Preparers Professional Services. The authorities say the business was a front for the procurement of illegal permanent-residence documents, known as green cards.

Mr. Browne and Ms. Mozer-Browne were originally charged in the scheme with nearly two dozen others in June 2006. All but one of them, Wendy Harrison, have either pleaded guilty or been convicted in the case. Ms. Harrison, the authorities said, is a fugitive.

A woman who took part in a sophisticated marriage scam that charged foreigners seeking citizenship up to $60,000 for a mate has been sentenced to more than three years in prison, authorities said Tuesday.

Tina Tran, 47, was sentenced to 37 months in prison and three years probation Monday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said. She pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy and visa fraud charges.

Tran was accused of being a key conspirator in a fraud ring targeting Chinese and Vietnamese nationals. Prosecutors said the Orange County-based ring has been linked to as many as 70 sham marriages and the filing of more than 100 bogus visa petitions.

Vladimir Danilov's wife never stepped inside his home, even after they married.

After all, the 40-year-old Danilov was living there with a girlfriend half his age.

Malkhaz Kapanadze's bride would've needed to board a plane to see him. He was living in Brooklyn with his other wife and their child. But it didn't matter to this woman, as long as her $300-per-month checks kept coming in the mail.

These Volusia County marriages - and many others, investigators say - were more like business transactions than stories of happily ever after.

They were at the heart of a federal investigation into a Central Florida couple accused of arranging marriages between U.S. citizens and immigrants who wanted the fast - and fraudulent - path to citizenship.

THE JUST-released "Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak" is a collection of 22 poems by 17 detainees at the US detention center at Guantánamo Bay. Edited by Marc Falkoff, each poem had to be cleared by the Pentagon. The result offers a rare glimpse into the lives of the prisoners.

Immigration laws make it doubly difficult for foreign-born partners to remain in the U.S. Gary and Michael have been together for more than 29 years, but the life they've built could be undone in an instant. Gary is an illegal immigrant, and he's HIV-positive. If Gary, 47, and Michael, 60, were a man and a woman, they could marry and Gary could then apply for legal residence right away. But federal authorities don't recognize same-sex marriage. If Gary had been an illegal immigrant by 1986, he could have gained amnesty under immigration reforms enacted that year. But he was here legally until 1996, by which time changes in immigration law changes made it virtually impossible for him to remain here legally.

The former head of the state public defender's office in St. Louis has pleaded guilty to charges of arranging a sham marriage to keep his boyfriend in the U.S.

The Web site for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Tuesday that Eric Affholter entered the federal plea agreement Monday.

An indictment in Manhattan federal court said the five instructed their sham marriage clients and would-be spouses to open joint bank accounts, put utility bills in both their names and prepare for immigration interviews by answering mock questions.

An Atlanta woman faces up to ten years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiring to use a sham marriage to illegally keep an Israeli man in the United States.

Cameron Lloyd, 56, a minister, has pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court to one count of conspiracy to commit visa fraud in connection with a sham marriage scheme that netted the participants more than $1 million.

Prosecutors said that Beverly Mozer-Browne owned and operated a business in Queens called Help Preparers Professional Services(HPPS) that purported to offer its customers assistance in a variety of financial and legal matters. In fact, the primary business at HPPS was fraudulently procuring permanent resident documents or "green cards," from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), formerly known as the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), in exchange for fees ranging from $8,000 to $16,000.

Officials are after fraudulent marriages. But how do you tell it's a fraud?

While Americans argue over religious red herrings such as abortion, right to die, feminism, stem cell research, and creationism vs. evolution, George W. Bush acts with impunity. Rhetoric without substance. Hypocrisy. This split, this dichotomy, illustrates a disturbing element within the American psyche: despite the professed separation of church and state, politics has rarely been so steeped in the trappings of religion.

According to the indictment, Starnes and others recruited the U.S. citizens and foreign nationals to enter into the sham marriages and promised to pay the U.S. citizens as compensation as follows: $1,000 on the day of the marriage; $1,000 three months after the marriage; $2,000 after the marriage interview with immigration officials; and $1,000 after the foreign born national received his or her permanent resident status. As part of the alleged conspiracy, the U.S. citizens allegedly took steps to further each other's marriage frauds, including attending each others' weddings and posing for photos, knowing the photos would be used to support the legitimacy of the marriages. Starnes also offered advice on how to make marriages appear legitimate, the indictment alleges.

If convicted, each count carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Jack Kevorkian - once America's most ardent advocate of physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients - has ended an eight-year prison sentence apparently determined to wade right back into the right-to-die debate.

Additional charges have been brought against a Kearns woman and her boyfriend, who are accused of arranging a sham marriage to keep the man in the United States.

In a tiny government office in Zirndorf, Georg Schleyer takes handfuls of ripped up bits of paper out of a sack and arranges them on his desk.

Authorities contend the marriage of Tori Crowther and Gassan Hassan Said was not a match made in heaven.
Instead, they claim that the December wedding was a scam designed to keep the Venezuelan groom in the country - and that the arrangements were made by Said's girlfriend, Eva Daisy Aguilar, a wedding planner.

Terrorists have also been involved in sham marriages, which are attractive because federal law allows an alien who is the spouse of a U.S. citizen to gain lawful permanent residency. However, federal law prohibits marriage fraud, which is defined as a marriage that is entered solely "for the purpose of evading any provision of the immigration laws." A number of terrorists and terror supporters affiliated with al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad used sham marriages. For example, three members of a Hezbollah fundraising cell in Charlotte, North Carolina were involved in sham marriages. Two of the women who married conspirators were actually a lesbian couple who lived together rather than with their "husbands."

An 18-year-old pleaded guilty to trying to hire a hit man to kill his ex-girlfriend's nearly full-term fetus and was sentenced to more than six years in prison.

Charles D. Young received 76½ months in prison Tuesday after pleading guilty to first-degree solicitation to commit manslaughter. State law allows for such a count when a viable fetus is the intended target.

A 65-year-old man pleaded guilty in federal court yesterday to helping set up a sham marriage to allow a Chinese man, described as his lover, to remain in the United States.

A Jordanian national accused of laundering at least $6 million via fraudulent schemes will remain behind bars because of fear he will flee the country before he can be tried.

"At this point the case is strong," said U.S. Magistrate Holly B. Fitzsimmons said of the charges facing Fares Khraisat, 37, of Judd Road, Easton and owner of Zam Zam Telecard Inc., 2690 East Main St. "He knows he's going to be deported and his wife is going to be deported. That's a powerful incentive to flee."

An Israeli man living in West Virgina and his wife, who lives in Georgia, have been indicted on a federal charge that accuses them of conspiring to use a sham marriage to illegally keep the man in the United States.

Two illegal immigrants have been indicted on federal charges of arranging their own sham marriages, one to a former Navy man and the other to an undercover federal agent.

An 84-year-old woman who confessed to having sex with an 11-year-old boy in her foster care reached a deal with prosecutors and pleaded guilty Thursday to attempted sex abuse, officials said.

We promise to write. Go get 'em W!

A ringleader in a massive marriage fraud scheme was sentenced to nearly 3 1/2 years in prison yesterday by a judge who criticized the man for saying he had arranged more than 100 phony marriages only to help fellow Ghanaian immigrants stay in the United States.

"That's a mansion you built," U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III said to Samuel Acquah, holding up a picture of Acquah's $775,000 house in Bowie. "You did this for greed. You didn't do it to help anyone. So get that notion out of your head."

Food waste in America typically doubles during the holidays, a byproduct of the same overindulgence that leads to extra pounds on the waistline.
The easiest trick to avoiding that extra waste when preparing big holiday feasts is to pay as much attention to making plans for the leftovers as you do to the recipe, says a University of Arizona anthropologist who studies garbage.

Nelson, a Republican from Lewisville, would have Texas law require marriage license applicants to swear in writing that they aren't marrying to circumvent immigration laws and that they aren't getting paid to enter into such a charade. Lying on the application would be perjury, a third-degree felony punishable by two to 10 years in prison and a maximum fine of $10,000.

Tough sentencing laws, record numbers of drug offenders and high crime rates have contributed to the United States having the largest prison population and the highest rate of incarceration in the world, according to criminal justice experts.

Cops blasted 50 bullets at three unarmed men near a Queens strip club early yesterday, killing a groom hours before his wedding, wounding two of his pals and spurring outraged relatives of the victims to call the shooting unjustified.

Racism is practically taboo for most citizens of the U.S., while sexism is still acceptable to most people.

A lovesick 16-year-old girl crashed her car into an oncoming vehicle in a suicide attempt, counting down the moments before impact in text messages sent to the female classmate who spurned her, authorities say.

The girl survived; a woman in the other car was killed.

The teenager, Louise Egan Brunstad, was charged Thursday with murder in the Oct. 4 wreck.

In more than 30 years as a writer, social commentator and political gadfly, Arianna Huffington has set her steely, hazel-eyed gaze on everyone from Pablo Picasso to Dick Cheney. Few have emerged unscathed.

U.S. citizens were recruited and paid between $5,000 and $6,000 to enter into sham marriages with Chinese aliens as part of a conspiracy to smuggle them into the United States, federal prosecutors said.

A San Mateo County Superior Court judge today sentenced Bobby Tran to 30 years in prison for killing a 22-year-old Chinese immigrant who had enlisted his help arranging a sham marriage so she could stay in the United States.

It was supposed to be a day of cultural triumph for tongue-in-cheek movie 'Snakes On A Plane'. Instead Samuel L. Jackson and his co-stars took a back seat to another soaraway tabloid hit… the story of an alleged "biblical plague" in picturesque Wiltshire.

"Until death do us part" did not extend beyond the courthouse steps for three members of an immigrant family after each member married U.S. citizens in Kansas City.

As the British terror plot was unfolding, the Bush administration quietly tried to take away $6 million that was supposed to be spent this year developing new explosives detection technology.

A new Gallup poll finds that many Americans -- what it calls "substantial minorities" -- harbor "negative feelings or prejudices against people of the Muslim faith" in this country. Nearly one in four Americans, 22%, say they would not like to have a Muslim as a neighbor.

From the page:

-- Their marriage is cleared of sham status, but the native Kenyan is accused of having another husband in Africa. --

From the page:

-- Federal authorities Tuesday announced charges against two dozen people accused of helping bring Vietnamese to Utah through sham marriages. --

From the page:

-- A West Hartford man has pleaded guilty to a charge stemming from a scheme involving fraudulent marriages. --

From the page:

-- More than a third of the American public suspects that federal officials assisted in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East, according to a new Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll. --

From the page:

-- While journalists feel they have gotten closer to their audiences and more willing to innovate, they also are more pessimistic about the public. It is possible that journalists feel they have done much of what they can do themselves to address journalism's problems. What they are left with are issues they cannot contend with alone. And they believe the companies they work for in the last five years have moved in ways that have only made things worse.

On top of that, there are signs that the growth areas in journalism are not seeing the kind of investment of resources to build for the future.

If five years ago we saw the seeds of change, today we see a trend toward fragmentation among all players involved - journalists, executives and the public.

Not only do they disagree on solutions, they seem further apart on identifying the problems. --

From the page:

-- Condoleezza Rice has described the plight of Lebanon as a part of the "birth pangs of a new Middle East" and said that Israel should ignore calls for a ceasefire. --

From the page:

-- They told the world that their relationship was like any other and that's why they should be allowed to marry. Now, friends say, they are showing once again that they are just like any other couple: Two years after getting married, Julie and Hillary Goodridge, lead plaintiffs in the state's landmark gay marriage case, are splitting. --

From the page:

-- The US Senate has approved a controversial bill to expand embryonic stem cell research, which President George W Bush has promised to veto. --

From the page:

-- The US House of Representatives has rejected a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, ending the congressional debate on the issue. --

From the page:

-- John Lennon outraged ordinary Americans with his remark that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. He angered the American authorities almost as much after he set himself up in New York and openly criticised the war in Vietnam.

Only now, however, is it being fully revealed how the authorities in Washington spent years amassing a dossier of evidence against the most outspoken Beatle with the sole aim of ejecting him from the United States for good. The evidence is to be exposed in a new film by the team behind Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore's documentary opposing George Bush's "war on terror". --

From the page:

-- The man who last year won a bruising battle to disconnect his brain-damaged wife from a feeding tube is campaigning against government intrusion around the country.

The political action committee formed by Michael Schiavo - whose wife, Terri, died after a seven-year court and political fight that reached Capitol Hill - has raised about $25,000 and is targeting races in Colorado, Florida and Texas. --

From the page:

-- For much of the five past months, jurors in the murder and racketeering trial against the Aryan Brotherhood have watched a bizarre, blood-curdling pageant of career criminals take the witness box at the federal courthouse in Santa Ana to testify against what prosecutors call one of the nation's most ruthless prison gangs. --

From the page:

-- The dispute over the Bush administration's secret eavesdropping of US citizens has reignited after it emerged the White House had brokered a deal with Congress that critics say gives it even greater flexibility to monitor phone calls electronically. --

From the page:

-- Two inmates have filed a lawsuit against the Indiana Department of Correction to overturn a policy that bars magazines such as Playboy and Hustler. --

From the page:

-- A conservative group on Wednesday sued to stop Michigan State University from offering health insurance to the partners of gay and lesbian workers and said the school is violating the state constitution. --

From the page:

-- Independence Day is celebrated once a year in most of America. In Queens, the most ethnically diverse county in the nation, where an estimated 44 percent of the 2.2 million residents are foreign born, it is celebrated again and again and again. --

From the page:

-- Eighteen years ago, Morning Edition launched what has become an Independence Day tradition: hosts, reporters, newscasters and commentators reading the Declaration of Independence. --

From the page:

-- The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed Monday. --

From the page:

-- Who should decide the fate of marriage in America? Will it be four out of seven state supreme court justices in Massachusetts — or the sovereign people of the United States? --

From the page:

-- A woman offended when Victoria's Secret staff gave her only the option of an employee restroom in which to nurse her baby organized a nursing protest in front of the store. --

From the page:

--Two Vancouver brothers were sentenced Friday to federal prison for orchestrating a marriage scam that got more than four dozen Vietnamese nationals into the United States on fiancee visas. --

From the page:

-- Ric Weiland, one of the first five Microsoft Corp. employees, died Saturday at his Seattle home at the age of 53. The King County Medical Examiner's Office said he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. --

From the page:

-- The minute they spotted the mannequins in Macy's department store window celebrating the city's Gay Pride week, Brian Camenker and the watchdog activists at MassResistance jumped into action. --

From the page:

-- A clash between police and patrons of an all-night diner 40 years ago once was a forgotten footnote in history. For members of the transgender community, though, it was the start of a slow march toward widespread acceptance. --

From the page:

-- The Mid-America Regional Council is launching the first AirQ Haiku contest on July 1, 2006, to promote air quality in the Kansas City region. --

From the page:

-- Over the last year, The New York Times has twice published reports about secret antiterrorism programs being run by the Bush administration. Both times, critics have claimed that the paper was being unpatriotic or even aiding the terrorists. Some have even suggested that it should be indicted under the Espionage Act. There have been a handful of times in American history when the government has indeed tried to prosecute journalists for publishing things it preferred to keep quiet. None of them turned out well — from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the time when the government tried to enjoin The Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers. --

From the page:

-- The New York Times hit back at bitter government criticism of its decision to disclose details of a secret US anti-terror program to monitor global banking transactions. --

From the page:

-- The Pentagon no longer deems homosexuality a mental disorder, officials said Wednesday, although the reversal has no effect on U.S. policy prohibiting openly gay people from serving in the military. --

From the page:

-- Torture is never acceptable, but it's a reality that should be covered by rules, Alan Dershowitz says. The lawyer and Harvard Law School professor says the president should be held responsible for acts of torture and be required to sign torture warrants. --

From the page:

-- Ending years of silence, Hernandez's relatives and friends recounted how he repeatedly bragged that De Luna went to Death Row for a murder actually committed by Hernandez, a violent felon who died in 1999. Five people now say Hernandez told them that he stabbed Lopez and that De Luna, whom he called his "stupid tocayo," or namesake, went to Death Row in his place. --

From the page:

-- A Monday ruling making it easier for Kansas jurors to impose the death penalty may be the first sign that the Supreme Court's two new justices will tip the balance away from tighter restrictions on capital punishment. --

From the page:

-- The youth violence rate is down, on a national level as well as in Detroit, where commentator Desiree Cooper lives. Still, she's been noticing more and more funerals for young people killed in urban violence, because the funerals are more and more ostentatious. Funeral directors have expressed their dismay at the trend -- and Cooper shares their sentiments. --

From the page:

-- Australian Guantanamo Bay inmate David Hicks has lost his latest bid for freedom after the British government said on Tuesday it would not seek his release. Hicks' supporters said the decision was further cruel punishment. --

From the page:

-- Two of last week's biggest stories -- the arrest of seven Florida men on a conspiracy bombing plot and the government's probe into the records of a banking group called SWIFT -- were covered by the media in very different ways. --

From the page:

-- A Daly City man faces up to 30 years in prison in the death of a Chinese immigrant whose sham marriage he arranged so she could stay in the country. --

-- When the history of the online media revolution is written, 2006 should merit special mention as a turning point for the blogosphere. This is the year, for better or for worse, when bloggers earned their first official media stripes.

Bloggers have considered themselves media almost since the beginning of their brief existence. They proudly claim the "citizen media" mantle and call their work by names like "grassroots journalism," "participatory journalism" and "public journalism." But self-proclamation doesn't carry the same weight as official recognition -- something bloggers have only just begun to win.

The first significant victory came in March, when the Federal Election Commission largely exempted blogs from campaign finance rules on the grounds that they are media. They applied to blogs the same exemption that governs newspapers, broadcasters and other traditional outlets.

The commission had hinted at such a decision in a November advisory opinion that said the costs incurred by one blog publisher "in covering or carrying news stories, commentary, or editorials on its Web sites are encompassed by the press exception."

The later rules, which the agency approved unanimously, recognized "the Internet as a unique and evolving mode of mass communication and political speech that is distinct from other media in a manner that warrants a restrained regulatory approach."

More recently, bloggers have scored wins in the state judicial and legislative branches, including a ruling for independent journalists who had been sued in California by Apple Computer.

The defendants in that case, Apple Insider and PowerPage, had posted information about a forthcoming product. The information was provided by anonymous company sources, and Apple argued that the publication of the information violated trade secrets. They wanted the blogs to disclose their sources.

The bloggers, defended by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said California's "shield law" for protecting journalistic sources applied to them. The state district court sided with Apple, but the appeals court overturned that ruling.

"We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes 'legitimate journalis[m],'" the court wrote on May 26. "The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here." The court added that the Web postings were "conceptually indistinguishable from publishing a newspaper, and we see no theoretical basis for treating it differently."

Earlier that month, an advertising agency dropped a similar lawsuit against a blog named the Maine Web Report after bad publicity in the blogosphere. And in Connecticut, state legislators passed a shield law after rejecting an effort to exclude blog authors and people without journalism degrees.

All of those developments indicate the government's growing acceptance of grassroots publications as valid sources of information. "[A] solid body of law is being developed upholding the principles that citizen media deserves the same First Amendment protections as 'professional' journalists," Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos wrote after the Apple ruling.

There are still obstacles to the official recognition of the convergence between old and new media, however. The debate about shield laws is a case in point. Not all states have them, and while bills before Congress would let journalists protect their anonymous sources, not everyone is keen on the idea of giving such protection to citizens who think of themselves as journalists. --

-- A retired farmer who says he served in the German army in World War II is turning part of his land into a battleground of sorts with his memorial to a leader he claims is misunderstood, Adolf Hitler.

Ted Junker, 87, plans a grand opening June 25 and says his goal is to clear up inaccuracies about the war and Hitler's role in it.

In other words, he doesn't accept that Hitler was to blame for starting the war in which 50 million people died, including some 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

"I like the U.S. I can't understand why people don't know the truth. This is for understanding, not hate," Junker said. --

-- A former U.S. immigration office worker who joined with others to make more than $1 million by producing hundreds of fake green cards was among 30 people charged when the sham marriage scam was broken up Wednesday, officials said.

Phillip A. Browne, a U.S. immigration office worker who resigned in November, allegedly conspired with his sister from April 2001 until November to provide the permanent residence documents in exchange for fees ranging from $8,000 to $16,000.

The sister, Beverly Mozer-Browne, owned and operated a Queens business, Help Preparers Professional Services, that claimed to offer financial and legal help when its primary business was actually to provide the bogus documents, according to an indictment in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

Browne, 40, and Mozer-Browne, 49, had residences in Brooklyn and Kissimmee, Fla., authorities said. They were awaiting appearances in court. It was unclear who would represent them.

Authorities said 27 of 30 people were arrested Wednesday and three were being sought. --

-- A Superior Court jury awarded $US61 million ($82 million) to two FedEx drivers of Lebanese descent who claimed a manager harassed them with racial slurs for two years.

Edgar Rizkallah, 43, and Kamil Issa, 36, said in the discrimination lawsuit they were called "terrorists", "camel jockeys" and other epithets in 1999 and 2000 by Stacy Shoun, terminal manager for the Oakland FedEx Ground facility where the two men were contract drivers.

An Alameda County Superior Court jury on Friday awarded the men $US50 million in punitive damages, on top of $US11 million in compensatory damages the jury awarded them on May 24, a lawyer for the plaintiffs and a FedEx Ground spokesman said on Saturday.

The company plans to appeal. Spokesman Maury Lane said other managers testified that the harassment never happened, but he declined to discuss specifics of the case, citing ongoing litigation.

"The jury's verdict was wrong and excessive," Lane said. "The company has strong anti-discriminatory policies, and this is not tolerated." --

-- The chief suspect in the killing of seven members of a family in Indianapolis has surrendered to police in the Mid-Western US city.

Desmond Turner, 28, has been charged with murder, after what police said was likely to have been a botched robbery.

A second suspect had been arrested earlier in a police search.

The killings - of three children and four adults - are reported to be the worst seen in Indianapolis for more than 20 years.

Mr Turner gave himself up to police in a prearranged rendezvous on Saturday evening.

"Indianapolis can sleep a lot easier tonight," said deputy police chief Clifford Myers. --

-- A US war veteran is suing film-maker Michael Moore for $85m (£45m), alleging TV clips of him were used without his consent in documentary Fahrenheit 9/11.

Sgt Peter Damon, 33, who lost both arms in Iraq, claims Moore never asked if he could use an interview Sgt Damon did with NBC's Nightly News.

Sgt Damon claimed Moore edited the footage to make him appear to "voice a complaint about the war effort".

Award-winning director Moore was not immediately available for comment. --

-- It can cope with 175 different languages, takes five seconds to reach, and now it's even distributing free anti-smoking drugs.

New York's 311 service (pronounced three, one, one) has just reached its third birthday, and it is a quiet source of civic pride.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, this hotline that handles all non-emergency calls from the public is one of the innovations that has helped keep the city relatively calm.

Before the technocratic New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg introduced it, there were more than 40 different phone numbers for people to ring for complaints, or advice, about living in this intensely bureaucratic city.

Twenty-six million phone calls later - all dealt with individually by trained responders - New Yorkers know exactly where to go for information: dial 311. --

-- US Marines could face the death penalty after one of their number took horrific photographs of a massacre in Iraq on his mobile phone, The Independent on Sunday has learned.

The photographs, seized by the US Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), show many victims shot at close range in the head and chest, execution-style, according to sources who have seen them. One image shows a mother and young child bent over on the floor as if in prayer. Both have been shot dead.

Similar photographs taken by a Marines intelligence team which arrived on the scene later show that soldiers "suffered a total breakdown in morality and leadership, with tragic results", according to a US official quoted by the Los Angeles Times yesterday.

The killing of more than 20 Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha last November, first reported in the IoS two months ago, has become an international scandal after evidence from two official investigations was shown to Congressmen in the past 10 days. Democrat John Murtha, a former Marines colonel who has retained close links to the military despite his denunciation of the Iraq occupation, said Marines "killed innocent civilians in cold blood".

Eyewitness accounts by local people and a video shot by an Iraqi journalism student had already called into question the Marines' version of events in Haditha just over six months ago. But the photographs by American forces could prove the crucial piece of evidence in an investigation that is now expected to result in charges of murder, dereliction of duty and making false statements against up to a dozen Marines.

According to reports in the US, military prosecutors may seek the death penalty for those found guilty of murder. Three Marines officers have already been relieved of duty, and more may be disciplined in a separate investigation into whether there was a cover-up after the killings. --

-- Border security is the new mantra for modern-day bigotry. It provides the talking point for the excesses of the senseless Sensenbrenner - King Immigration Bill, which calls for a 700-mile fence between the United States and Mexico (but not Canada).

It gives enemies of the tribes a respectable label for dishonest attacks on reservation self-government. So let's throw down a challenge to all the Lou Dobbs-style talking heads on television. If you are really concerned about effective policing of the nation's frontiers, restore to the Indian tribes on the border the authority to make their contribution.

Some 50 tribal sovereignties lie within 100 miles of the northern or southern borders. They are ready and willing to back up national security with skills that the U.S. Border Patrol acknowledges are indispensable.

The Tohono O'odham Nation fields the Grey Wolves, an internationally famous corps of trackers, which has served on the Mexican border and in the Balkans. The St. Regis Mohawk Tribal Police force of 15 officers devotes 50 percent of its time to border enforcement in northern New York - 80 percent in the winter when the St. Lawrence River is frozen over. But the U.S. Supreme Court has tied the hands of tribal law enforcement with an irrational and completely unjustified legal principle.

Tribes are not allowed to enforce criminal law against non-Indians. This is what the Supreme Court has held since the 1978 case of Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe (435 U.S. 191).

This notorious case has contributed enormously to the difficulties of law enforcement on the reservation. It has been a major factor in the spread of methamphetamine marketing, not to mention sexual abuse and domestic violence. Now it is hindering the tribal contribution to border enforcement. If U.S. Reps. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and Peter King, R-N.Y., the chairs of the crucial law enforcement committees in the House of Representatives, are really serious about border security, they should be leading a congressional drive to override the Oliphant holding. --

-- US President George W Bush has moved to quell a firestorm over his Government's secret collection of telephone records of tens of millions of private citizens, insisting they were all needed to "target Al Qaeda".

But the latest controversy has already spawned a major lawsuit against Verizon, one of the telephone companies involved, and members of Congress expressed unease over what they see as gradual erosion of privacy rights.

The lawsuit, filed in New York on Friday, seeks $US5 billion from Verizon in damages, alleging the company has broken the law by agreeing to provide the National Security Agency with telephone records of its clients.

The plaintiffs argue phone companies should not cooperate with the NSA that specialises in electronic espionage without a proper court warrant based on well-grounded "suspicion of terrorist activity or other criminal activity". --

-- Dear Cary,

I am seriously considering offering to marry a man from another country so that he can get his citizenship -- and I can get a lot of money.

Even as I'm typing these words, I know how horrible they sound. But I am not a huge advocate of marriage, am currently single (have had great love in my life), and I need capital to get a business off the ground. I know this is morally reprehensible to a lot of people, but, truthfully, it is an amazing little piece of power that I am holding that could change the lives of two people. I wouldn't marry just anyone -- he would need to be decent and his reasons for wanting to be an American citizen would need to be pure, non-criminal (I know, I know, marrying me would be a crime, but you know what I mean), and of sound mind. --

-- A paroled sex offender was arrested after a sheriff's deputy found drugs, weapons and what appeared to be child pornography in the trunk of his car during a traffic stop, authorities said.

Stephan Anthony Algeo, 49, of Joshua Tree was arrested Friday on Highway 62 near Linda Lee Drive, according to a San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department news release.

A deputy pulled him over about 10:20 a.m. on suspicion of speeding on the desert highway. When the deputy learned Algeo was a registered sex offender, he searched his car.

According to the news release, the deputy found a glass methamphetamine pipe in the car and a loaded .22-caliber revolver, an illegal brass-knuckle knife, suspected marijuana, methamphetamine, and several pictures depicting girls in pornographic poses in the trunk. --

-- An Oxnard man who carefully cataloged a collection of 15,000 pornographic images of female children was sentenced Monday to a year in jail and three years of probation.

Raymond Allen Candel, 65, recently pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of possession of child pornography and faced up to two years in jail, one year for each count.

Ventura County Superior Court Judge Edward Brodie said Candel will get another year in jail if he violates the terms of his probation. These terms include that Candel stay away from using the Internet, not possess pornography and notify his employer if there is a likelihood that he might be working where children are present.

Candel purchased several memberships to child pornography Web sites, according to Deputy District Attorney Howard Wise.

"Mr. Candel had been downloading child pornography on his computer for more than three years," Wise said in an interview.

The message in this case is that California has weak child pornography laws that need to be strengthened to be like the laws in other states such as Texas and Arizona, Wise said. In Arizona, Candel could have received life in prison, he said. --

-- Eight U.S. sailors at a Florida navy station fraudulently married Polish and Romanian women in order to collect extra housing allowances, according to federal charges filed on Tuesday.

The women did not live with their Navy husbands, but used the sham marriages to apply for U.S. citizenship, U.S. Attorney Paul Perez said in a news release.

The sailors, seven of whom are still in the Navy, were all stationed at the Mayport naval station in northeast Florida.

They were charged with conspiracy, marriage fraud and making false claims to the government to collect $35,000 worth of extra housing allowances.

The tax-free allowances for off-base housing are based partly on marital status and number of dependents. --

-- At 22, Sarah Patterson has spent several years in the working world, but she has yet to report her income to the government.

For one thing, Patterson, of Manhattan, works in a cash business, with no withholding tax. But she is also worried about how to list her profession on a 1040 form: she is a foot-fetish model.

"What I do is not commonly considered work," explained Patterson, who said she earns more than $100 an hour for letting men ogle or stroke her shapely feet. "When they ask for your occupation, I can't imagine there would be a little box to check describing my job." She can take home up to $400 for working a foot-fetish party where clients take turns enjoying her feet, she said. Private sessions can be even more lucrative. --

-- The US secretary of state has defended the invasion of Iraq and hinted that America will not release prisoners from Guantanamo Bay until it is certain they pose no threat.

"I know we have made tactical errors, thousands of them, I'm sure," Condoleezza Rice told a gathering of 200 foreign policy experts, local officials and journalists organised by the Chatham House foreign policy institute in England on Friday. --

-- Started as the super-secret "Project Y" in 1943, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has long been the keystone institution of the American nuclear-weapons producing complex. It was the birthplace of Fat Man and Little Boy, the two nuclear bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Last year, the University of California, which has managed the lab for the Department of Energy since its inception, decided to put Los Alamos on the auction block. In December 2005, construction giant Bechtel won a $553 million yearly management contract to run the sprawling complex, which employs more than 13,000 people and has an estimated $2.2 billion annual budget.

"Privatization" has been in the news ever since George W. Bush became president. His administration has radically reduced the size of government, turning over to private companies critical governmental functions involving prisons, schools, water, welfare, Medicare, and utilities as well as war-fighting, and is always pushing for more of the same. Outside of Washington, the pitfalls of privatization are on permanent display in Iraq, where companies like Halliburton have reaped billions in contracts. Performing jobs once carried out by members of the military -- from base building and mail delivery to food service -- they have bilked the government while undermining the safety of American forces by providing substandard services and products. Halliburton has been joined by a cottage industry of military-support companies responsible for everything from transportation to interrogation. On the war front, private companies are ubiquitous, increasingly indispensable, and largely unregulated -- a lethal combination.

Now, the long arm of privatization is reaching deep into an almost unimaginable place at the heart of the national security apparatus --- the laboratory where scientists learned to harness the power of the atom more than 60 years ago and created weapons of apocalyptic proportions. --

-- It began as an unheralded coast-to-coast walk designed to help morbidly obese Steve Vaught lose weight.

But some 2,300 miles (3,700 km) into his journey, the former US Marine now has a book deal, a 700,000-hits-a-month website and has been interviewed by Oprah. --

-- Imam Almamy Korobara is reaching out beyond his remote corner of Mali to connect with millions of Muslims and religious leaders worldwide using the web of linked computers called the Internet, thanks to information technology donated by the U.S. government.

Korobara is imam of the Grand Mosque of Djenné, one of Africa's oldest towns. His reputation as an influential religious and spiritual leader now is being spread worldwide after the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) recently provided him with a computer and one year of Internet service. --